STEVEN SHAVIRO

"Shaviro
explains to us
in his airy way the mistakes of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Saussure,
Chomsky, even Lacan (though Foucault is, like Shaviro, pretty much
infallible) while citing as authorities various comic books and science
fiction authors - as well, of course, as Burroughs and his cinematic
interpreter, David Cronenberg."

The
aliens are gray, hairless, about
four feet tall, with leathery skin and vaguely humanoid features.
Their eyes are deep, black, and unblinking, and have hypnotic
power. If you look directly into them, your will crumbles and you
are paralyzed... Perhaps the aliens are trying to breed a hybrid
species, mixing their genes with ours. Or maybe they can't even
reproduce on their own, but need help from our bodies and DNA. We
service them as bees do flowers. In any case, the aliens seem
clinically detached during these procedures. Sex is evidently not
joyous or fulfilling for them. "They don't know what a porn movie
is," one victim remarks. "[They don't] understand the concept of
voyeurism or anything like that." Their interest in us is not
prurient, nor do they bear us malice. It's just that they don't
realize how much it all hurts. As Budd Hopkins puts it, "they
simply appear unable for the most part to understand us, our
feelings, our terror, our love for one another." They fail to
grasp even the simplest things about us, like how we dress or how
we do our hair. Human emotions are "like candy" or "like a drug"
to them, one abductee explains, a dangerous luxury in which they
dare not indulge. No wonder our close encounters end in mutual
misunderstanding.

"Electricity,
and finance, and sexuality, and
happiness, and evolution, they all come about because of the
amourous inclinations of matter." (Philip Pullman)

"She was
suffering as much as she had ever
suffered before, because she was going to do what she wanted to
do. But it would not make her happy. She did not have the courage
to stop from doing what she wanted to do. She knew that it would
not make her happy, because only the dreams of crazy people come
true. She thought that she was only interested in duplicating a
dream, but in doing so she necessarily became the complete victim
of a nightmare." (Jane Bowles)

"Who knows what
binds a lover to another,
other than excesses of fantasy and disappointment..." (Camille
Roy)

"The shape of
power, snaking irregularly
through the matrix of sociocultural life, doesn't just yield to
your touch; it asks for recompense always." (Martha Baer)

"Morals are
just these sensory coagulations,
these tensions knotted and bunched across the skin of your
beliefs. Dr. Octagon inverts the Trad hierarchy of
head/stomach so that your head tastes ill and your intestines
think. Your brain throbs, in peristaltic waves. Dr.
Octagon keeps everything unreal, its voice in perpetual
motion, from glutinous to gloating to dastardly to bedside to
malicious. Instead of grounding you it uproots you, pulling you
across into its world, moulding then massaging you across a
series of thresholds you never knew existed." (Kodwo Eshun)

"Anemones and
madrepore formations constitute
a loaded and baroque panorama, a place where emotions take the
shape of a petrified nature that somehow keeps shifting form, a
constant metaphor of itself. Kitsch is this ability to surpass
essential belongings and rest in more superficial ones, to create
an imaginary landscape through accumulation and camouflage, and
to crystallize the continuous movement of life in the permeable
disguise of fantasy." (Celeste Olalquiaga)

"What you
want is always out of reach when
you can't sleep. You can only have what you don't want, or what
you thought you wanted, lurching toward you, unspeakable
horror.... Oh there's nothing empty about insomnia; it's full to
bursting! Chains of thought, some miniscule, tinnily chime in
your pricked ear; some, immense, wind Laoco\F6n-like around
your twitching limbs. You think you're waiting but you're not;
you're awaited, though not by sleep. Insomnia is the wish to be
immortal, granted by an ass." (Kathryn Davis)

"There's a
difference between a thug and a
rebel." (Chuck D)

"Honestly, at
this point, all I really care
about is novelty and making sure I have ringside seats for
whatever awful spectacle is about to unfold."(Alan Cabal)

"And the
whole Bush family, from Texas,
should be boiled in poison oil."(Dr. Hunter S. Thompson)

"In the
marketplace, at least, rape is the
natural order of things. And remarkably popular, too, on both
sides of the exchange. People hand over their money, their lives,
to DynaZauber or any other corporation, they know what they're
getting. They want to get connected; the customers are always
bottoms looking to get topped, the harder and bloodier, the
better." (K. W. Jeter)

"If we make
Napster-like free file sharing
illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either computers or
democracy. You can't have both."(Jaron Lanier)

"The most
merciful thing in the world, I
think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its
contents."(H. P. Lovecraft)

"Psychopath's
not a narrow term
anymore...I've heard it applied to whole cultures on occasion.
It's even been applied to me once or twice. Reality is so
flexible these days, it's hard to tell who's disconnected from it
and who isn't. You might even say it's a pointless
distinction."(Richard K. Morgan)

"Artists are
interesting people with dull ideas, while scientists are dull people
with interesting ideas."(Bruce Sterling)